HOW CONSUMPTION IS SPREAD.

New Zealand Mail, Issue 1264, 21 May 1896, Page 39

HOW CONSUMPTION IS SPREAD.

In liia annual report to the City Council, Mr J. Doyle. Corporation inspector, says : The Undesirable Immigrants Bill being so much in evidence just now, it may not bo out of place to refer to it in its relation to the spread of tuberculosis, or eonsump. tion. Dr Prudden, in his work on Bacteria, says, and it seems to me that the information cannot be too widely spread: “ With regard to this disease, which is responsible for one-seventh of the total deaths, the most common seat of infection is the lungs, although any part of the body may be affected. The disease itself is not hereditary, although a predisposition to it may be inherited, and it cannot occur unless the tubercle bacilli get into the body from the outside. A germ itself has rarely, if ever, been shown to have been inherited. If, therefore, we can keep this particular germ away from human beings there would be no more consumption, no matter what the inherent tendencies of the individual might be. The most common way in which the germ gains access to the respiratory passages is by being breathed in with the dust which is floating in the air in rooms or places where tubercular persons have been, and the most common way in which the tubercle bacilli gets into the air from consumptive people is this: Particles of tissue containing large numbers of tubercle bacilli are cast out and discharged in the sputum. Persons in various stages of the disease walk about the streets, visit theatres and assembly rooms, and the infectious material is discharged on the floors or pavements where it is ground up and takes its place among the floating dust of the air. Were it not for tho fact that the infecting material is enormously diluted by the circulating air and that the average individual is not prodisposed to tho disease, its effects would bo so marked that moro stringent regulations would havo to bo adopted. A general knowledge of the fact that a consumptive person may bo a source of danger to all around him unless proper precautions are taken would do much to lessen tho evil.